| The present thesis is an investigation of gender metaphor in advertising from a cognitive point of view. Black's Interaction Theory is taken as the basis of the study. The investigation is carried out firstly on micro-linguistic level where Black's Interaction Theory of metaphor study is integrated with Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory to study the various types of gender metaphors. Also, the persuasiveness of gender metaphors in sales is studied on macro-linguistic level from the angle of consumer emotions.Gender metaphors appear in advertisement in various forms and they can be divided in two main categories: verbal gender metaphors and pictorial gender metaphors, with the later one sub-divided into three sub-categories. In many cases, both verbal and visual metaphors are present simultaneously in an advertisement. Also, some conventional gender metaphors are employed in advertisement to create novel gender metaphor. The concept gender is socio-culturally situated andivalue-laden, which involves not only the social expectations towards men and women, and the social values attached to them, but also how men and women perceive the images and the roles of themselves and those of the opposite sex. The persuasiveness of gender metaphor lies in the fact that the idealized and valued images of consumers are attached to products in terms of metaphor, enabling the target audience to entertain emotionally charged thoughts about the products, suggesting certain emotionally satisfying experience. |
